Video is a valuable medium for presenting and receiving feedback on ideas and data. Video is often incorporated in presentations that include a variety of media, including graphical slides with text and images, audio, animations, and interactive components, such as audio/video conferencing, messaging, whiteboard, annotation, polling, and other features. Various online, network, and mobile applications have been developed for virtual meetings and the presentation of materials to distributed viewers through a variety of connected devices, such as personal computers, tablets, smartphones, video conferencing systems, etc.
Presentation media, including video, is generally served from the presenter's system or a remote host system for the presentation application. The presenter controls the flow of the media, such as playing, pausing, forward, reverse, etc., and attempts to guide viewers and related interactions and discussion based on the hope that each viewer is seeing the same frames of video in an approximately synchronous fashion. However, the reality of serving video is highly dependent on bandwidth, processing, and other delays that may create lag in distributed viewer systems. Alternatively, the presenter may distribute media files or links to geographically distributed video servers that enable the viewer to access and control video replay at will. The hope is that audio or other cues during the presentation will encourage viewers to watch the video when instructed by the presenter, but the presenter effectively loses control of the video content and synchronization of playback.
Video-on-demand systems may enable distribution of video content from locations geographically closer to each viewer system to minimize lag for each viewer. However, this may only increase lag disparities among individual systems, particularly in the event that one or more viewers are not close to any available server (such as in an underserved country or remote area), are using a bandwidth or processing constrained device, or have other lag producing issues.